Month: October 2019

Epistemic (Spot Check?): The Fate of Rome Round 2

Introduction

Two months ago I did an epistemic spot check on Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome. At the time I found only a minor flaw- stating that Roman ships weren’t surpassed until the 14th century, when China did it in the 13th century. I did not consider this fatal by any means.

Recently I decided to reread The Fate of Rome (affiliate link). This was driven by a few things. Primarily, I found myself resistant to reading more Roman history, which typically means I’m holding things in my short-term memory and will not be allowed to put new things into my brain until the existing things have been put in long term storage. But it did not hurt at all that I had just gotten access to a new exobrain, Roam, a workflowy/wiki hybrid, and yes, for purposes of this post that is an extremely unfortunate name.

This post is going to wear many hats: a second check of The Fate of Rome, a log of my work improving the epistemic spot check process, and a discussion of how Roam has affected my work. These will not be equally interesting to all people but I couldn’t write it any other way. That said, let us begin.

Process

Previously, I’d “taken notes” by highlighting passages and occasionally writing notes in the Kindle file, and then never reading them because Amazon’s anti-consumer choices made them a pain to access. Worse, I used highlights as an excuse not to take information into my brain- it was a pointer to process something later, not a reminder of something I had already processed.

When I took notes in Roam, I took notes. My initial workflow was to create a page for the book I was reading, and on it list claims from the book, each of which got their own page (I would eventually change that and leave them as bullet points on the source page). You can see the eventual result here: typically I recorded multiple claims per source-page, mostly rephrased into my own words, and always thought through instead of saved for thinking about later. (For comparison: notes from Fall of Rome round 1).

A few changes started about this time:

  • I stopped being able to read without taking notes on my laptop, meaning I could no longer use my Kindle. I don’t think I got worse at reading on Kindle, it just became obvious how bad that always was.
  • Despite having to use a multi-purpose device, I was more focused and harder to distract, probably by an order of magnitude.
  • I couldn’t work on the project passed ~9PM. I don’t think I was ever doing my best work past 9, it just became obvious in contrast to the better work I could now do.
  • I wanted to put a timestamp on every claim, so I noticed when it was unclear what time period a statement referred to.
  • “How do we know that?” questions moved from something I pushed myself to think about during second read-throughs to popping into my head unbidden. There were just natural “How do we know that?” shaped holes in my notes.
  • It became much more obvious when a bunch of paragraphs said nothing, or said nothing I valued, because even when I tried I couldn’t distill them into my notes.
  • Reading books felt like play in a way it never had before, even though it was always something I enjoyed doing.
  • I got more proactive about housecleaning. No, I wasn’t using Roam as a GTD system, it was purely research notes. And yet, I had more activation energy and more willingness to do multi-step chores. I have logs from Toggl to demonstrate this correlation, if not causation. Even assuming it’s causal I’d be shocked if it were common, so you probably shouldn’t incorporate it into your expected value of trying Roam.

At this stage the workflow is nothing I couldn’t have done in google docs, but I didn’t. I have all kinds of justifications about how knowing what I could do with Roam changed how I approached the work, but when I started that was theoretical so I’m not confident that’s what was going on. Nonetheless, I did it in Roam where I didn’t in Docs. 

So I had a Source page and a bunch of Claim pages. I started to do what I used to do in google docs or even a wordpress draft: select a claim and look for things confirming or denying it. This meant putting evidence on the Claims pages. But that didn’t feel right- why should some sources get their own page when others sat on the pages of claims from other sources? So I let claims motivate my choice of sources to look up, but every source got its own page with its claims listed on it. When I felt I knew enough I would create a Synthesis page representing what I really thought, with links to all the relevant claims (Roam lets you link to bullet points, not just pages) and a slider bar stating how firmly I believed it. This supported something I already wanted conceptually, which was shifting from [evaluating claims for truth and then judging the trustworthiness of the book] to [collating data from multiple sources of unknown reliability to inform my opinion of the world]. When this happened it became obvious Claims didn’t need their own pages and could live happily as bullet points on their associated Source page.

Once I had a Synthesis I would back-propagate a Credence to the claim that inspired the thread. Ideally I would have back propagated to all relevant claims, but that was more effort than it was worth. I put credences right in the claim so they would automatically show up when linked to, giving me a quick visual on how credible the book’s claims were when I investigated. The visual isn’t perfect because claims can have wildly different weights, but it is a start.

[Due to a bug, slider bars can be changed even by people given only read-access, so I also put the Credence in text]

Results

It turns out that The Fate of Rome was a near-ideal book about which to start asking “how do we know this?” (or maybe I’ll do more books and find out it’s average, but it definitely rewarded the behavior), because it is working with cutting edge science to prove its points, meaning it’s doing a lot of interpretation.

The Fate of Rome makes two big claims: Rome’s peak coincides with a period of unusually favorable and stable weather in the Mediterranean (from 200 BC to 150 AD), and Rome was a constant disease fest punctuated by peaks of even more illness.  What I would like to do right now is link you to my Fate of Rome Roam page, tell you to look at the links at the bottom, filter for Synthesis, and just browse through my work. It’s better prepared than I could ever do linearly, and lets you choose which parts are important to you. But I suspect there’s a learning curve to Roam so I will write things out the tedious linear way.

The Fate of Rome lists many sources of data on ancient climate. Here is a list of what I consider the 5 strongest, and the time period they supposedly applied. If you were reading this on Roam, you would have page numbers so you could verify my interpretation:

  • Cosmogenic radionuclides in ice cores say that 360BC – 690 AD had unusually stable solar activity
  • (Source unknown) says no major volcanic eruptions between “late republic” (end of the BCs) and “age of Justinian” (530s)
  • Ratio of Oxygen18 to Oxygen16 in stalagmites points to warmth during “early Imperial Rome”
  • The Tiber River flooded regularly (source unknown) during peak Imperial Rome
  • Radiocarbon-dated sediments say the Dead Sea was at a peak from 200 BC to 200 AD

I have three complaints here: he doesn’t share the resolution of each method, two of the data points are unsourced (although one points to a paper where I could have looked it up), and these time periods don’t match up particularly well. For the first: I tried to find the resolution for ice cores at a depth of 2000 years, and was unable to come to a definitive answer, but I did find a suggestion that they’re extremely sensitive to the assumptions in your model, which makes me nervous. The third thing seems even more concerning: if anything it seems like the good times should have rolled through the collapse of the western empire, not ended at 150AD like Fate suggests. When you add in the innate political nature of any claims about changing climate, I’m inclined to view Fate’s climate claims as speculative, although not impossible. 

Another question Fate raises is the baseline health of the Romans. I think Fate is correct that it was terrible, and that’s an update for me. Turns out communal baths are not a source of hygiene before chlorine. Harper claims the disease and parasite load was worse than the people on the same land before or after. I initially thought this seemed reasonable for “before” but unreasonable for “after”- medieval peasants had shockingly terrible diets and disease risks. But if anything the evidence supports the opposite of what I thought– you have to go pretty far back to find people much taller than the Romans, but height jumps just as the (western) empire falls. There are other explanations for this, around exactly which skeletons get found, but basically all the sources I found agreed that the Roman disease load was high.

I’m not without qualms though. A prime piece of evidence he uses to demonstrate a high disease load is dental caries (cavities) versus Linear Enamel Hypoplasia, a defect in the growth of a tooth. Medieval peasants had more caries than Romans but less LEH. Harper’s interpretation is that medieval peasants had worse diets than Romans (because the caries indicate high carb content) but less disease (LEH can be caused by both poor nutrition and disease, and a better diet is indicated by the lack of caries). Martin Bernstorff, a friendly medical student who I met on Roam Slack, helped me out on this one. Based on a half hour of his research, an equally plausible explanation is that medieval peasants had the same disease load but more calcium. This doesn’t mean Rome wasn’t terrible- medieval European peasants had it shockingly bad. But it is not clear cut evidence of Rome being worse.

A sub-claim is that the Antonine Plague (165AD-180AD) was caused by Smallpox. Harper is careful to say that retrospective diagnosis is difficult without biochemical evidence and there’s not actually a lot riding on this conclusion: he’s not doing epidemiological modeling dependent on properties of smallpox in particular, for example. But he does sound very confident, and I wanted to see if that was justified. Martin took a look at this one too, and concluded there was a 95% chance Harper was correct, assuming the Roman doctor’s notes were accurate. The remaining 5% covers the chance of a related pox virus with a lower mortality rate.

Overall I still like The Fate of Rome, but I have much less trust in it than I did after my first spot check, when its only sin was briefly forgetting China existed. It its fight with The Fall of Rome, it has lost ground.

 

More Process

My first try at Fate took an unrecorded number of hours to read, and ~two hours to spot check (this is shorter than usual, because of the amplification experiment) Call it < 10 hours, not counting the time to write it up. This round took 17 hours of combined reading and investigation into claims  (plus 1.5 hours of Martin’s time), and so far three hours to write it up. This isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison, but that’s not *that much* additional time, for the increase in depth and understanding I got. I credit Roam with speeding things up enormously.

Since this is partially a love letter to Roam, I want to add a few things: 

  • Over the years I’ve tried workflowy, calculist, and google docs. I did not go looking for other tools in this space and don’t intend to because I am Roam’s exact use case, so even if it’s not the best now I expect it grow towards me.
  • It’s just into beta and it shows: I probably file a bug or feature request per day. It’s never anything that renders Roam unusable, just things take longer than they should. 
  • Roam’s CEO, Conor White-Sullivan, has encouraged me to share my experience but has not given me anything for this post except a good product and the hope that it will continue to exist if enough people use it. 

 

As always, tremendous thanks to my Patreon patrons for their support. I would additionally like to thank Martin Bernstorff for his research (check out his new blog) and Edo Arad for comments on a draft.

Amazon would like me to inform you that sometimes I use affiliate links to them, where I earn trivial amounts of money. Humble Bundle hasn’t asked for this, but I do use affiliate links for them too sometimes.

What Comes After Epistemic Spot Checks?

When I read a non-fiction book, I want to know if it’s correct before I commit anything it says to memory. But if I already knew the truth status of all of its claims, I wouldn’t need to read it. Epistemic Spot Checks are an attempt to square that circle by sampling a book’s claims and determining their truth value, with the assumption that the sample is representative of the whole.

Some claims are easier to check than others. On one end are simple facts, e.g., “Emperor Valerian spent his final years as a Persian prisoner”. This was easy and quick to verify: googling “emperor valerian” was quite sufficient. “Roman ship sizes weren’t exceeded until the 15th century” looks similar, but it wasn’t. If you google the claim itself, it will look confirmed (evidence: me and 3 other people in the forecasting tournament did this). At the last second while researching this, I decided to check the size of Chinese ships, which surpassed Roman ships sooner than Europe did, by about a century.

On first blush this looks like a success story, but it’s not. I was only able to catch the mistake because I had a bunch of background knowledge about the state of the world. If I didn’t already know mid-millenium China was better than Europe at almost everything (and I remember a time when I didn’t), I could easily have drawn the wrong conclusion about that claim. And following a procedure that would catch issues like this every time would take much more time than ESCs currently get.

Then there’s terminally vague questions, like “Did early modern Europe have more emphasis on rationality and less superstition than other parts of the world?” (As claimed by The Unbound Prometheus). It would be optimistic to say that question requires several books to answer, but even if that were true, each of them would need at least an ESC themselves to see if they’re trustworthy, which might involve checking other claims requiring several books to verify… pretty soon it’s a master’s thesis.

But I can’t get a master’s degree in everything interesting or relevant to my life. And that brings up another point: credentialism. A lot of ESC revolves around “Have people who have officially been Deemed Credible sanctioned this fact?” rather than “Have I seen evidence that I, personally, judge to be compelling?” 

The Fate of Rome (Kyle Harper) and The Fall of Rome (Bryan Ward-Perkins) are both about the collapse of the western Roman empire. They both did almost flawlessly on their respective epistemic spot checks. And yet, they attribute the fall of Rome to very different causes, and devote almost no time to the others’ explanation. If you drew a venn diagram of the data they discuss, the circles would be almost but not quite entirely distinct. The word “plague” appears 651 times in Fate and 6 times in Fall, who introduces the topic mostly to dismiss the idea that it was causally related to the fall- which is how Fate treats all those border adjustments happening from 300 AD on. Fate is very into discussing climate, but Fall uses that space to talk about pottery.

This is why I called the process epistemic spot checking, not truth-checking. Determining if a book is true requires not only determining if each individual claim is true, but what other explanations exist and what has been left out. Depending on the specifics, ESC as I do them now are perhaps half the work of reading the subsection of the book I verify. Really thoroughly checking a single paragraph in a published paper took me 10-20 hours. And even if I succeed at the ESC, all I have is a thumbs up/thumbs down on the book.

Around the same time I was doing ESCs on The Fall of Rome and The Fate of Rome (the ESCs were published far apart to get maximum publicity for the Amplification experiment, but I read and performed the ESCs very close together), I was commissioned to do a shallow review on the question of “How to get consistency in predictions or evaluations of questions?” I got excellent feedback from the person who commissioned it, but I felt like it said a lot more about the state of a field of literature than the state of the world, because I had to take authors’ words for their findings. It had all the problems ESCs were designed to prevent.

I’m in the early stages of trying to form something better: something that incorporates the depth of epistemic spot checks with the breadth of field reviews. It’s designed to bootstrap from knowing nothing in a field to being grounded and informed and having a firm base on which to evaluate new information. This is hard and I expect it to take a while. 

 

Epistemic Spot Checks: The Fall of Rome

Introduction

Epistemic spot checks are a series in which I select claims from the first few chapters of a book and investigate them for accuracy, to determine if a book is worth my time. This month’s subject is The Fall of Rome, by Bryan Ward-Perkins, which advocates for the view that Rome fell, and it was probably a military problem.

Like August’s The Fate of Rome, this spot check was done as part of a collaboration with Parallel Forecasting and Foretold, which means that instead of resolving a claim as true or false, I give a confidence distribution of what I think I would answer if I spent 10 hours on the question (in reality I spent 10-45 minutes per question). Sometimes the claim is a question with a numerical answer, sometimes it is just a statement and I state how likely I think the statement is to be true.

This spot check is subject to the same constraints as The Fate of Rome, including:

  1. Some of my answers include research from the forecasters, not just my own.
  2. Due to our procedure for choosing questions, I didn’t investigate all the claims I would have liked to.

Claims

Claim made by the text:  “[Emperor Valerian] spent the final years of his life as a captive at the Persian Court”
Question I answered: what is the chance that is true?
My answer: I estimate a chance of (99 – 3*lognormal(0,1)) that Emperor Valerian was captured by the Persians and spent multiple years as a prisoner before dying in captivity.

You don’t even have to click on the Wikipedia page to confirm this is the common story: it’s in the google preview for “emperor valerian”. So the only question is the chance that all of history got this wrong. Wikipedia lists five primary sources, of which I verified three.  https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/what-really-happened-valerian-was-roman-emperor-humiliated-and-skinned-hands-enemy-008598 raises questions about how badly Valerian was treated, but not that he was captive.

My only qualm is the chance that this could be a lie perpetuated at the time. Maybe Valerian died and the Persians used a double, maybe something weirder happened. System 2 says the chance of this is < 10% but gut says < 15%.

 

Claim made by the text: “What had totally disappeared, however, were the good-quality, low-value items, made in bulk, and available so widely in the Roman period”
Question I answered: What is the chance mass-produced, low-value items available so widely in the Roman period, disappear in Britain by 600 AD?
My answer: I estimate a chance of (64 to 93, normal distribution) that mass-produced, low-value items were available in Britain during Roman rule and not after 600 AD.

This was one of the hardest claims to investigate, because it represents original research by Ward-Perkins. I had basically given up on answering this without a pottery PhD until google suggestions gave me the perfect article.

This is actually a compound claim by Ward-Perkins: 

  1. Roman coinage and mass-produced, low-cost, high-quality pottery disappeared from Britain and then the rest of post-Roman Europe.
  2. The state of pottery and coinage is a good proxy for the state of goods and trades as a whole, because they preserve so amazingly well and are relatively easy to date.

Data points:

    • Focuses on how amphorae were never really abundant in Britain
    • Chart stops at 400 AD
    • Graph showing large drops in amphorae distribution by 410 AD

If we believe Ward-Perkins and Brewminate, I estimate the chances that pottery massively declined at 95-99,  times 80-95 that other good declined with them. There remains the chances that the historical record is massively misleading (very unlikely with pots, although I don’t know how likely it is to have missed sites entirely), and that W-P et al are misinterpreting the record. I would be very surprised if so many sites had been missed as to invalidate this data, call it 5-15%. Gut feeling, 5-20% chance the W-P crowd are exaggerating the data, but given the absence of challenges, not higher than that and not a significant chance they’re just making shit up.

(95 to 99)*(85 to 95) * (80 to 95) = 64 to 93%

 

Claim made by the text: The Romans had mass literacy, which declined during the Dark Ages.
Question I answered: “[% population able to read at American 1st grade level during Imperial Rome] – [% population able to do same in the same geographic area in 1000 AD] = N%. What is N?”
My answer: I estimate that there is a 95% chance [Roman literacy] – [Dark Ages literacy] = (0 to 60, normal distribution) 

Data Points:

 

The highest estimate of literacy in Roman Empire I found is 30%.  Call it twice that for ability to read at a 1st grade level in cities. So the range is 5%-60%. 

The absolute lowest the European 1000AD literacy rate could be is 0; the highest estimate is 5% (and that was in the 1300s, which were probably more literate).  From the absence of graffiti I infer that even minimal literacy achievement dropped a great deal. 

Maximum = 60%-1% = 59%
Minimum = 5%-5%=0

 

Claim made by the text: “What some people describe as “the invasion of Rome by Germanic barbarians”, Walter Goffart describes as “the Romans incorporating the Germanic tribes into their citizenry and setting them up as rulers who reported to the empire.” and “Rome did fall, but only because it had voluntarily delegated its own power, not because it had been successfully invaded”.”
Question I answered: What is my confidence that this accurately represents historian Walter Goffart’s views?
My answer: I estimate that after 10 hours of research, I would be 68-92% confident this describes Goffart’s views accurately.

Data points:

  • https://blog.oup.com/2005/12/the_fall_of_rom/
    • Peter Heather: The most influential statement of this, perhaps, is Walter Goffart’s brilliant aphorism that the fall of the Western Empire was just ‘an imaginative experiment that got a little out of hand’. Goffart means that changes in Roman policy towards the barbarians led to the emergence of the successor states, dependant on barbarian military power and incorporating Roman institutions, and that the process which brought this out was not a particularly violent one.
  • https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1680215.Barbarians_and_Romans_A_D_418_584?from_search=true 
    • “Despite intermittent turbulence and destruction, much of the Roman West came under barbarian control in an orderly fashion.”
  • https://press.princeton.edu/titles/1036.html
    • “Despite intermittent turbulence and destruction, much of the Roman West came under barbarian control in an orderly fashion. Goths, Burgundians, and other aliens were accommodated within the provinces without disrupting the settled population or overturning the patterns of landownership. Walter Goffart examines these arrangements and shows that they were based on the procedures of Roman taxation, rather than on those of military billeting (the so-called hospitalitas system), as has long been thought. Resident proprietors could be left in undisturbed possession of their lands because the proceeds of taxation,rather than land itself, were awarded to the barbarian troops and their leaders.”
  • https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00523.x
    • “the barbarians and Rome, instead of being in constant conflict with each other, occupied a joined space, a single world in which both were entitled to share. What we call the barbarian invasions was primarily a drawing of foreigners into Roman service, a process sponsored, encouraged, and rewarded by Rome. Simultaneously, the Romans energetically upheld their supremacy. Many barbarian peoples were suppressed and vanished; the survivors were persuaded and learned to shoulder Roman tasks. Rome was never discredited or repudiated. The future endorsed and carried forward what the Empire stood for in religion, law, administration, literacy, and language.”
  • https://books.google.com/books/about/Rome_s_Fall_and_After.html?id=55pDIwvWnpoC “Rome’s Fall and After” indicates Goffat does believe Rome fell. But suggests its main problem was constantinople, not interactions with barbarians at all. So top percentage correct = 90%)

 

This seems pretty conclusive that Goffart thought Barbarians were accommodated rather than conquered the area (so my minimum estimate that the summary was correct must be greater than 50%). However it’s not clear how much power he thought they took, or whether rome fell at all. This could be a poor restatement, or it could be that if I read Goffart’s actual work and not just book jacket blurbs I’d agree.

 

Question I answered: Chance Elizabeth would recommend this book as a reliable source on the topic to an interested friend, if they asked tomorrow (8/31/19)?
My answer: There is a (91-99%, normal distribution) chance I would recommend this to a friend.

99% is in range, because I definitely think it’s worth reading if they’re interested in the topic. I think I’d recommend it before Fate of Rome, because it establishes that rome fell more concretely.

Is there a chance I wouldn’t recommend it?

  • They could have already read it
  • They could be more interested in disease and climate change (in which case I’d recommend Fate)
  • I could forget about it
  • I could not want to take responsibility for their reading.
  • I could be unconfident that Fall was better than what they’d find by chance.
    • This feels like the biggest one.
    • But the question doesn’t say “best book”, it just says “reliable source”
    • Only real qualm on that is that is normal history book qualms

So the minimum is 91%

 

Bonus Claims

These are the claims I didn’t check, but other people made predictions on how I would guess. Note that at this point the predictions haven’t been very accurate- whether they’re net positive depends on how you weight the questions. And Foretold is beta software that hasn’t prioritized export yet, so I’m using *shudder* screen shots. But for the sake of completeness:

Claim made by the text: The Fall of Rome: Roman Pottery pre-400AD was high quality and uniform.
Predicted answer: 29.9% to 63.5% chance this claim is correct

Claim made by the text: “In Britain new coins ceased to reach the island, except in tiny quantities, at the beginning of the fifth century”
Predicted answer: 31.6% to 94% chance this claim is correct

 

Claim made by the text: The Fall of Rome: [average German soldiers’ height] – [average Roman soldiers’ height] = N feet. What is N? .
Predicted answer: -0.107 to 0.61 ft.

 

Claim made by the text: The Romans chose to cede local control of Gaul to the Germanic tribes in the 400s, as opposed to losing them in a military conquest.
Predicted answer: 28.5% to 85.6% chance this claim is correct

 

Claim made by the text: The Germanic tribes who took over local control of Gaul in the 400s reported to the Emperor.
Predicted answer: 4.77% to 50.9% chance this claim is correct

 

Conclusion

The Fall of Rome did very well on spot-checking- no outright disagreements at all, just some uncertainties. 

On the other hand, The Fall of Rome barely mentions disease and doesn’t mention climate change at all, which my previous book, The Fate of Rome, claimed to be the main causes of the fall. The Fate of Rome did almost as well in epistemic spot checking as Fall, yet they can’t both be correct. What’s going on? I’m going to address that in a separate post, because I want to be able to link to it without forcing people to read this entire spot check.

In terms of readability, Fall starts slowly but the second half is by far the most interested I have ever been in pottery or archeology.

[Many thanks to my Patreon patrons and Parallel Forecast for financial support for this post]

Does combining epistemic spot checks and prediction markets sound super fun to you? Good news: We’re launching round three of the experiment today, with prizes of up to $65/question. The focal book will be The Unbound Prometheus, by David S. Landes, on the Industrial Revolution. The market opens today and will remain open until 10/27 (inclusive).

 

5 years ago I wrote a glowing review of Thomas Was Alone (republished below). Today it went up as part of the $1 tier at the latest Humble Bundle (meaning $1 gets you 4 games). And if you use this link, I get some tiny amount for your purchase.

BONUS: I bought this bundle for a different tier and don’t need my new copy of Thomas Was Alone or Stanley Parable. I will give these away to the first person to ask for each game (one game per person). E-mail me at elizabeth-at-this-domain.

My Review

Humans have an amazing ability to ascribe intention and emotion when logic tells us there could not possibly be any, a fact demonstrated most succinctly by this clip from Community

 

but proven somewhat more rigorously by An experimental study of apparent behaviour (PDF), in which experimental subjects were asked to watch and describ a short film showing some shapes moving around.  If you would like to play along at home, I’ve embedded the video below.

 

The first subject group (n=34 undergraduate women) was given no instruction beyond “describe what happened in the movie.”  Exactly one subject described it in purely geometric terms.  Two others described the shapes as birds, and the rest described them as humans.  19 gave a full story.  The stories people told  (in this treatment and another where subjects were primed to view the shapes as people) had a shocking amount in common, suggesting there was something innate in the interpretation.*

My point is, humans will bond with anything.  In many ways it’s easier to bond with/project onto simple objects than actual humans or almost humans.  This can be used to great effect in art, to evoke desired emotions without all the messiness of using real people.  A simple example is an extremely short, simple game whose name I’m not going to tell you, because it would bias your experience of it.

Did you play it?  The game’s name is Loneliness.  Can you guess why?

I like to think the shunned little square from Loneliness grew up in to be Chris in Thomas Was Alone, a game about rectangles making friends.  Thomas Was Alone‘s premise sounds kinds of dumb: it’s a puzzle platformer with some narration ascribing emotions to the rectangles you solve puzzles with.  But it pulls this off so masterfully I actually bought branded merchandise of it, which is something I can’t say about a single other game.  The story is genuinely sweet, but the real skill is in how the puzzles reinforce it.  Each rectangle has slightly different skills, some more useful than others.  Chris is a shitty jumper whose initial story revolved around resenting the better jumper, and who is nothing but dead weight in the first puzzles (the other rectangles could get through without him, but he could not with them) suddenly becomes indispensable, I felt pride and relief.

TWA starts out a little slow.  If you want to play, finish the first world before deciding whether to continue or quit.  But I highly recommend it both as an interesting example of human psychology, and as a piece of happy art, which I don’t think we see enough of.

Okay, fine, I don’t see enough of because I’m a severe subscriber to the dark and edgy trend.  But that just makes Thomas Was Alone more impressive.

*Attenuated by the fact that women attending college during WW2 is a narrow subset of the population.